State and Public Media in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2025
The state-control model remains the dominant paradigm across Latin America and the Caribbean, with more than three-quarters of the 67 state and public media companies surveyed in the region falling into this category. The region includes several highly centralized state economies—among them Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua—as well as the increasingly authoritarian regime of President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, where public/state media outlets remain tightly controlled and heavily dependent on the government.
The State Media Monitor project observed no significant improvements in the independence of state and public media in the region over the past year. On the contrary, we added two more state-affiliated media firms in El Salvador—Grupo Samix and Grupo Órbita—both classified as captured public/state-managed media (CaPu). Owing to insufficient evidence of public ownership, we also removed Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala Broadcasting from SMM’s typology. Likewise, the Cuban union-run weekly Trabajadores, which has ceased offering publicly available news and now confines itself to internal union updates, was excluded from this year’s analysis.
Apart from spending cuts, and the persistent threat of them, across several public service media outlets, notably in Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras, few emerging trends in the Latin America region were observed. In El Salvador, the backsliding of democracy accelerated following a constitutional amendment enabling President Nayib Bukele to remain in power for life. Independent journalism has become almost impossible, with all public media outlets repurposed to serve the government’s political agenda. In Cuba, the last remaining bastion of communism in the Western Hemisphere, media freedom remains under constant assault.
While Latin America retains a more diverse state and public media landscape than many other regions, political pressure and threats to independent journalism are mounting. Populist politicians in positions of power have openly targeted state and public media they cannot fully control, fuelling self-censorship and hastening the collapse of critical reporting.